The Real Danger for Virginia’s Election This Year: Further Disenfranchisement

More than a year and a half after Virginia withdrew from a widely used voter-list maintenance system, the consequences of that decision — one spurred by a right-wing misinformation campaign — are still coming to light.

Among the many tactics deployed by the anti-democracy movement as it sought to undermine confidence in U.S. elections was the targeting of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonpartisan organization that helps states maintain up-to-date voter lists. American Oversight’s investigation of the influence networks behind the anti-ERIC campaign revealed their connections to the broader effort to weaken democracy and highlighted the inadequate — and often harmful — replacements that states adopted in ERIC’s place. 

As part of that ongoing investigation, American Oversight has recently uncovered records that highlight the deficiencies in the patchwork of poor substitutes that Virginia has relied on since it withdrew from ERIC in May 2023, around the same time that several other states also caved to the election denial movement’s false claims. Following its withdrawal, Virginia rushed to replace its ERIC membership with multiple separate agreements with election departments in other states. 

In the summer of 2024, Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed two executive orders aimed at addressing the state’s withdrawal from ERIC as well as xenophobic claims about supposed widespread illegal voting by noncitizens. Executive Order 31 directs the Virginia Department of Elections (ELECT) to sign new agreements with state agencies for obtaining some data similar to that provided by ERIC. Executive Order 35, which largely focused on the false threat of “noncitizen voting,” allowed Youngkin to order the removal of more than 6,000 voters from the rolls. Despite a legal challenge from the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 1,600 voter registrations were ultimately canceled less than two weeks before the November election. Last month, the department — now under the Trump administration — said that it would be dropping out of the case, which was brought by voting-rights groups.

As a result of Youngkin’s executive orders, Virginia agencies must share data with the elections department more frequently: The Department of Motor Vehicles must send a list of potential non-citizens on a daily basis; the Department of Health must on a weekly basis share a list of anyone 17 or older who has died in the state; and the State Police must on a monthly basis send data on new felony convictions and corrections and revisions to existing records. 

American Oversight has obtained three previously unseen memoranda of understanding (MOUs) from ELECT related to the implementation of these executive orders, as well as an additional MOU designed to replace Virginia’s ERIC membership. In recent years, under Commissioner Susan Beals, ELECT has dramatically expanded the use of agreements with other agencies and states to conduct voter roll maintenance, in part because of the loss of ERIC’s data, which contains protected confidential information on voters from dozens of states.

The data specified in these three MOUs is only a fraction of what ERIC previously supplied to Virginia, and does not meaningfully address the shortcomings ELECT has faced since the state withdrew. The MOU says that the DMV must supply a daily file of potential noncitizens, indicating a heavy reliance on data that could become out of date or used for discriminatory purposes against, say, naturalized citizens. 

The fourth MOU American Oversight obtained outlines an agreement between ELECT and the Kentucky State Board of Elections to compare respective voter registration data. ELECT has previously signed MOUs with Georgia, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia. The agreements had been initially conceived by a working group led by the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office, in the aftermath of numerous states leaving ERIC in 2023. These inter-state agreements are a flawed and insufficient substitution for ERIC membership. While ERIC uses protected information, such as Social Security numbers, to provide additional verification and a comprehensive review of voter information, the MOUs only use publicly available data, increasing the risk of false matches and resulting in more voters being unjustly removed from the rolls. 

Notably, Kentucky remains a member of ERIC, and Virginia would have been able to obtain much more valuable and accurate data from Kentucky if it had not withdrawn. Though the data Kentucky shared with Virginia is more accurate and is better updated as a result of its ERIC membership, the data specified in the MOU is nothing that a private citizen couldn’t independently obtain and lacks the range of identifying information that makes ERIC data so valuable. Furthermore, records obtained by American Oversight also reveal that Virginia and Kentucky have only exchanged data once since signing the MOU in March 2024, a far cry from regular data transfers provided by ERIC membership. 

Other records obtained by American Oversight also highlight how the withdrawal from ERIC created more work for ELECT. Just one month after leaving ERIC, a department official said in an internal email, “During the IT analysis of leaving ERIC, it was determined that my team would also need 2 temporary contractors added since the workload is so high.” 

With the Trump administration abandoning the lawsuit over the state’s voter-roll purges, and with Virginia — one of the few states with off-year elections this year — still relying on the inadequate agreements detailed above, the danger of further disenfranchisement is particularly concerning. As the records obtained by American Oversight demonstrate, ELECT officials continue to squander time and resources to reinvent the wheel, and still fall short of ERIC’s effectiveness. Learn more about American Oversight’s related investigations in the 2024 Anti-Democracy Playbook.